dev up 2018 – Ready Developer One - is a community-based gathering to which developers come from across the country come to connect and learn. Lucky for you, it is right here in the Lou.

dev up sessions and workshops cover a wide-range of platforms and languages. It is held at the St. Charles Convention Center and kicks off on Monday, October 8, 2018, with optional full-day workshops. Tuesday and Wednesday, October 9 and 10, 2018, will be packed with stimulating sessions, attendee parties, games, sponsors, food, networking opportunities, and fun.

dev up is a tech conference designed for developers by developers with an eagle-eye-focus on attendee experience that exists to reinforce the strength and skill of our development community. Join us!

Early bird registration discounts are still available – register today at www.devupconf.org

Ready developer one?

User Group - dev up Conference Retrospective

dev up ConferenceOpen forum roundtable

NOTE THE NEW LOCATION FOR THIS MONTH'S MEETING!

This year's dev up Conference saw a few changes. The leadership team is very interested in hearing feedback from those who attended and from those who could not attend. Bring your ideas and thoughts for improvement as we have an open forum retrospective. Attendees, speakers, sponsors -- all are welcome to attend and share.

We'll still have food and a time for sharing at 5:30. Our 6:00 meeting will be the group retrospective.

Open Source. Developers hear about it a lot. What should you really look for and why? For example, I choose to study nopCommerce, which has led to some amazing opportunities. nopCommerce has a familiar architecture, a plug-in model, and an active community. This is a fast paced walk-through of the nopCommerce architecture and source code. More importantly, you will discover the many ways to get involved with nopCommerce, or any other open source software, to better your career and life.

John has been developing software with the Microsoft stack for 20+ years. For most of the last 10 years, John has been a sub-contractor, business owner, and a Dad. John enjoys researching and applying new technologies to real world examples.

What’s one thing Slack, Facebook, and Google have in common? They’ve all embraced types in their JavaScript! Typed JavaScript is meeting lots of resistance from folks who don’t believe their JavaScript needs it, but many projects are transitioning to type systems such as TypeScript or Flow for better long-term maintainability and bug reduction.

In this session, Spencer will break down why types in your JavaScript will make you a better JS developer. We’ll explore the benefits brought on by typed JavaScript, such as better tooling and ease of refactoring. Finally, we’ll discuss how you can introduce typing to your JavaScript in projects small to large, new and old.

Hi, my name is Spencer Schneidenbach. I'm a software engineer and Microsoft MVP in the St. Louis area who specializes in ASP.NET, C#, JavaScript, and AngularJS 1/2. I’m passionate about software engineering and about sharing my knowledge with the community. Besides blogging, I also speak regularly at conferences and user groups around the country.

I currently work as the Principal and owner of Aviron Software, building awesome cloud- and web-based software for our clients.

I also maintain an active GitHub account where I publish all of the code I write about, as well as my Nuget packages.

I've been recognized as an OzCode Magician for helping advance the amazing OzCode Visual Studio extension, which can be used to greatly enhance your debugging experience!

While not working on software projects, I enjoy reading, blogging, and spending time with my two kids and wife.

The July event for the user group is a special full day event. We encourage you to sign up for it!

ArchitectNow is excited to partner with Microsoft and the local .NET User Group in hosting a full day of mobile developer training called Xamarin Dev Days. This FREE event is an all-day hands-on learning experience geared towards beginning mobile developers wanting to learn how to build, test, and connect native iOS, Android, and Windows apps. Throughout the morning all attendees will get introduced to the Xamarin platform and then, after a free lunch, get the opportunity to put their new knowledge into practice by building a cross-platform, cloud-connected app with Xamarin and Azure in Visual Studio.

This is your opportunity to see how you and your team can leverage your C# skills and tools to build native mobile apps across iOS, Android, and Windows while sharing a very significant amount of code between all platforms. All demonstrations will be in Visual Studio 2015 (for Windows) and Visual Studio for Mac (for Mac). During the afternoon hackathon portion of the event attendees will get guidance and support in building a full mobile app connected to the cloud via Azure API’s.

The event is free but registration is required to ensure you have a seat. Attendees wanting to participate in the hands-on lab will be notified of all software requirements prior to the event.

I’m sure you’ve at least heard about neural networks, but maybe you wonder what exactly is a Neural Network. This talk will take you gently into the machine learning branch of statistics with neural networks and demystify what they are. With examples and simple breakdowns about the math involved that anyone can follow. Topics and Demos Include: What is a Neural Network? What makes them so powerful? How are Neural Networks being used in the field? What is an activation function? What is Gradient Descent? ^ An Intro To Tensorflow Demo: XOR Gate Demo: Image Recognition To follow along with the talk the only math you will need to know are the basics: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Average, and Sum. Everything else very easy to follow.

As a passionate technologist it is my greatest joy to build solutions that bring organizations value not for 1-5 years, but that are built to flex and grow over the demands of the next 50+ years. I have been fortunate to work with some of the best minds in enterprise-scale data, services, dev-ops, BI, and people management. My knowledge is the culmination of aprox 20 of the best professionals in these fields spanning more than 100 years of expertise. I am in a unique position for a developer to be as business savvy as I am technically gifted.

My goal is to continue to work with the best, and to continue striving to be the best technologist I can.

It’s a new age, a new era, where Microsoft is leading the Open Source revolution. //BUILD is the Microsoft Developer event of the year where we learn about the strategy and direction that the technology will take. Join us for the Best of Build, Mike Benkovich will take you thru the latest features and share what's compelling and exciting. Explore the possible at Best of Build 2017. The schedule will cover:

Brad TutterowAll The New Things: A Madcap Tour of the latest in Microsoft Web Development

In this session, Brad Tutterow will walk through building a sample application using as many of the latest web development technologies on the Microsoft stack as we can fit in. We'll use Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio 2017, Entity Framework Core, ASP.NET Core, TypeScript, Angular 2, Docker Containers, and Microsoft Azure. I'll talk about the latest changes to the Microsoft web stack and show you how all of these exciting technologies blend together in an open web soup that is both healthy and delicious.

Brad is a software developer with a background in Microsoft and .NET technologies. He is currently a development manager with Relias Learning where his team delivers online education through the web, mobile applications, and distributed e-learning. Brad is passionate about continuous integration, automated deployments, good clean process, and open source web development technologies.

Twenty years ago, on January 28, 1997, Microsoft announced that they were going to launch Visual Studio 97 – a single product that would bring together best-of-breed productivity tools for any developer. This was no trivial undertaking. It was a challenging task to bring Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, and Visual InterDev into one single product. The team delivered, kicking off decades of incredible productivity for millions of developers worldwide.

Microsoft is excited to announce that Visual Studio 2017 will be available for download on Tuesday, March 7, 2017! Join us for this local launch event as Kevin Grossnicklaus shows off the new product.

Kevin is the President of a St. Louis-based consulting firm ArchitectNow. He and his team spend their days developing great software and brainstorming the next great app ideas. Kevin has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for the past five years and has just been recognized as an ASPInsider.

“Infrastructure as Code” as a tenet of DevOps is exciting to IT and Dev organizations alike. Imagine quickly and consistently building, tearing down, and re-building whole test/dev/production environments in the public and/or private cloud. Create and apply a text file that quickly configures storage, network, subnets, virtual machine NICs, firewall configurations, and virtual machines; all in one operation! In this session we’ll walk through the basics of building and utilizing these JSON templates, both in plain text and when driven through other tools such as Git, Git Hub, Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio. This will be a demo-heavy session, leaving you with examples and do-it-yourself homework to help you continue learning this very useful new cloud-first engine.

Kevin Remde – Sr. Technical Evangelist with Microsoft - is an engaging and highly sought-after speaker, blogger, and technical community organizer. A prolific blogger, Kevin shares his thoughts, ideas and tips on his “Full of I.T.” blog (http://aka.ms/FullOfIT). In his past outside of Microsoft, Kevin has held positions such as software engineer, information systems professional, and information systems manager. He loves sharing helpful new solutions and technologies with his Dev and IT Pro peers.

How do I join your group?Register here on the web site to receive our newsletter. Then, come to our monthly meetings. No fee, no mess, no fuss. Just information, learning, and great networking.

When is the next meeting?Our main meeting is almost always held on the last Monday of the month. Sometimes due to holidays or other circumstances, we move it to another night but that is very rare. Check the home page of the web site for details. The special interest groups meet at other times during the month. Check the SIG page and visit their individual sites for more information.

Can I post job information on this site?Yes, registered users can go to the "Jobs" tab to post open positions and view other jobs that have already been posted by other users.

How do I sponsor a meeting?Contact one of the leadership team members (found on the “Contact“ page) and they will fill you in on sponsorship details.

How do I receive the newsletter?Registered users automatically receive the newsletter when it is sent. It comes from the address “newsletter@stlnet.org“ so make sure that doesn't get caught in your spam catcher.